Europe weighs the pros and cons of ERTMS installation
Switching to the new technology can be hugely expensive, and other factors such as stock upgrades and cross-border compatibility must also be considered. PHILIP HAIGH reports
“The auditors found this money had not been spent well. For a project that aims to lower barriers across borders, they found limited focus on borders and the EU’s core corridors.”
“ERTMS is a single system for multiple infrastructure managers and railway undertakings with diverse needs, but it entails costly investments with, generally, no immediate benefit for those who have to bear the cost.”
That’s a conclusion from a recent report by the European Union’s auditors. It’s talking about a signalling system designed to work across borders and so ease the flow of goods and passengers between countries.
There’s widespread agreement that European Rail Traffic Management System (ERTMS) is a good idea, but its rollout is patchy and uncoordinated. By the end of 2016, just 4,000km (2,485 miles) of the EU’s core network of 50,000km of track had ERTMS installed. And just 10% of the EU’s fleet carries the kit. This for a project that started in 1998.
The reason is simple. Most EU countries have safe and effective signalling systems that do not need replacing.
Denmark is one with ageing signalling, and decided several years ago to replace it entirely with ERTMS. But it has found the switch expensive - the auditors report that Denmark is spending 1.2 million euros (£1.07m) per kilometre of line to convert to ERTMS. With a network of 2,132km, that’s over two billion euros just to fit the track kit.
Then there’s the cost of equipping rolling stock. Here the auditors reckon on a cost of 482,500 euros per locomotive, which includes the cost of buying and fitting the kit and training people. For new rolling stock, ERTMS inflates the price by 300,000 euros per unit (around 15% of total cost).
Scale that across the EU’s rolling stock fleet and that gives 10.8bn euros to retrofit ERTMS. Scale the Danish experience (together with the Dutch, as the auditors did) and you reach 84 billion euros for the EU’s 50,000km of core corridors (see panel). Equip the EU’s full 123,000km network and the bill reaches 188bn euros.
These vast sums are not the whole story. Denmark would have had large bills for conventional signalling renewals had it not opted for ERTMS.
Responding to the auditors, the European Commission noted: “The costs sometimes cited for ERTMS include associated costs (up to twothirds) beyond what relates directly to ERTMS, for example power supply, hardware and interlockings. The investments reflect a general upgrading of the signalling infrastructure, including addressing past maintenance backlogs, which go beyond ‘ERTMS investment’ alone.”
With no deadlines imposed by Brussels to decommission existing signalling, and with costs towering over benefits, the auditors found little incentive for track or train owners to switch to ERTMS.
But there are benefits, as Switzerland (ironically not an EU member) found when it installed ERTMS and cut 15 minutes from what was a 70-minute journey between Bern and Zurich, while also cutting headways to 110 seconds and increasing speeds to 200kph (125mph).
ERTMS exists in several levels (see panel), but where it’s being implemented it is mostly to Level 2, where train drivers receive their authority to move via radio rather than lineside signals. ( Level 3 remains an aspiration under development.)
However, there are different versions within Level 2, known as ‘baselines’. Track and train need to be working from the same baseline. Where railways have installed ERTMS L2 it’s mostly been to baseline two, but some are now upgrading to baseline three.
When this happens, train operators must upgrade their rolling stock. The auditors found a project in Germany that had retrofitted baseline 2 (strictly 2.3.0d) at a cost of 420,000-630,000 euros per locomotive. To upgrade to baseline three would cost, on average, another 270,000 euros per locomotive.
Further complications come from countries pursuing variations to ERTMS. As the auditors found: “The lack of compatibility of the ERTMS equipment is also the result of the fact that the industry prepares tailor-made solutions adapted to the specific requirements of each Member State, which are not always compatible. Potential problems and errors are usually not publicly communicated, and this affects the learning curve and makes it difficult to find common solutions.”
As with most auditors, the European Union’s are concerned with the way money is spent. Between 2007 and 2013, the EU allocated 1.2bn euros to ERTMS projects. Over 2014-20, it expects to spend 2.7bn euros.
The auditors found this money had not been spent well. For a project that aims to lower barriers across borders, they found limited focus on borders and the EU’s core corridors. Germany, for example, had ERTMS within its borders but not across any. And in the six countries they examined, 70% of EU ERTMS funds had gone towards passenger projects running almost exclusively on domestic lines. Rail freight accounted for the remaining 30%, with the auditors acknowledging that this had more cross-border potential.
One of the EU’s ERTMS funding streams is its cohesion fund but, found the auditors, this can only be spent on passenger vehicles for domestic services and specifically not on freight locomotives.
All this leads the auditors to comment: “Despite the fact that the ERTMS concept and the vision of enhancing interoperability are not generally questioned by the rail sector, so far ERTMS deployment has been low and patchy…
“This creates risks not only for the achievement of the ERTMS deployment targets set for 2030 and the investments made so far, but also for the realisation of a single European railway area which is one of the major policy objectives of the European Commission. It may also adversely affect the competitiveness of rail transport as compared with road haulage.”
For its part, the commission caveated many of its responses to the audit report with the phrase “insofar as it is within [our] remit”, suggesting that its powers to push ERTMS implementation are limited.
It said: “ERTMS’s ultimate objective was to replace legacy railway signalling and telecommunication systems in Europe with a single standard to foster higher-quality and costeffective railway services, notably cross-border, through increased interoperability and reducing the fragmentation of operational capabilities across the European rail network.
“As a common standard, ERTMS should also facilitate rail competitiveness in particular by reducing product diversity and pushing for economies of scale, leading ultimately to lower costs. Further, combined with increased standardisation for other railway products as a result of EU legislation, it will allow production of trains of a single specification suitable for use in many networks (even if they do not cross borders), thus significantly reducing costs for railway undertakings and infrastructure managers, while allowing manufacturers the benefit of much longer production runs.”
These advantages apply as much in Britain as elsewhere. But so do the problems the auditors found.